


You're not saved until you leave this place.

by organabanana



Series: 2021 Writing Challenge [1]
Category: Batman - All Media Types, DCU, DCU (Comics), Harley Quinn (Comics)
Genre: Abusive Joker (DCU)/Harleen Quinzel, F/F, Mild Blood, Past Joker (DCU)/Harleen Quinzel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-29
Updated: 2021-01-29
Packaged: 2021-03-15 14:09:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,318
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29065617
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/organabanana/pseuds/organabanana
Summary: Harley Quinn - she's not Harleen Quinzel anymore - has just been saved by Poison Ivy. The problem is Poison Ivy doesn't think Harley can really be saved. I just finished reading Harleen by Stjepan Sejic and I'm feeling A Certain Way. Reading it first is encouraged (and recommended because it's amazing) but not necessary to know what's going on.
Relationships: Pamela Isley & Harleen Quinzel, Pamela Isley/Harleen Quinzel
Series: 2021 Writing Challenge [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2132457
Comments: 10
Kudos: 80





	You're not saved until you leave this place.

**Author's Note:**

> This is not meant to be particularly true to any canonical storyline beyond using Harleen (the comic) as a starting point. I took the liberty of taking bits and pieces from different storylines because I could.
> 
> Written for the prompt "I should be in pain . . . . . why am I not in pain?” for week 4 of the 2021 writing challenge made by butterbee-writes on Tumblr.

Harley regains her consciousness slowly, as if she was struggling to emerge from an ocean of molasses. What a strange image, an ocean of molasses. That’s what it feels like, though. Thick and sticky and dark. As her senses begin to work once again, though, Harley realizes wherever she is smells nothing like molasses at all. It smells both fresh and damp somehow. Like she imagines a rainforest might smell like. Green and thick with life. And then there’s something else. Lighter. Floral, even. Jasmine, maybe?

“Doctor Quinzel.”

The woman’s voice doesn’t immediately ring a bell, but it feels familiar somehow. Under different circumstances, she’s sure she could figure it out. But Harley’s tired of fighting the not-really-molasses threatening to swallow her brain whole. She can’t play detective right now.

“Doctor Quinz—“

“It’s Harley,” she interrupts, her voice hoarse like she’s using it for the first time after a night of hard liquor. This doesn’t feel like a hangover, though. And she doesn’t feel like Doctor Quinzel anymore.

“Open your eyes.”

“Thanks, but I’ll pass.” This may not be a hangover, but her head still feels like it’s balancing precariously on the edge of the kind of headache that drives people to insanity.

_Heh_.

Like she needs a headache for that.

“Your eyes might be damaged. I don’t have all day.”

The woman’s tone is hard to read. Somewhere between annoyed and caring, somehow. Like she wishes she didn’t care, but she does anyway. Harley can sympathize.

“Damaged by what?” Harley asks, already opening her eyes and struggling to focus. All she sees is varying shades of green. “What happened?”

The woman doesn’t speak. Harley sees a blurred light among the greens and feels that flowery smell grow stronger when the woman leans closer to her face. It reminds her of her time as Arkham’s psychiatrist, asking questions and being ignored. And that’s when it clicks. Arkham. Of course.

“Ms. Isley?”

“Ivy.” 

Under different circumstances, Harley might have taken offense at the sharp tone of Pamela Isley’s correction. But she’s not exactly in a position to pick a fight with a supervillain, and - if she’s being perfectly honest - this may be the third or fourth time Ivy’s corrected her since they first met. No wonder she’s annoyed.

“What happened?” 

“Your eyes are fine. Your vision may be blurry for a while. I assume your glasses are still in the acid. What’s left of them, anyway.”

“Acid? What aci—“

Harley’s eyes widen even if she still can’t quite see. The acid. The vat of acid, and Jay’s hands around Harley’s wrists, and his smile… and then the searing pain. She brings her hands up with some effort, and even with her limited vision she can see they look bleached white. And yet…

“I should be in pain… Why am I not in pain?” She should also be in some major emotional distress, given the circumstances, but she’s more or less given up on her own mental stability these days. 

“My abilities aren’t limited to toxins, Harley. You’re enjoying a very good, very potent, all-natural anesthetic.”

“You saved me?” Harley wonders, briefly, whether she has any right to sound this surprised when this is the second time Pamela Isley has done just that. Save her. “Thank you.”

“Like I told you last time, don’t thank me yet,” Ivy says, and there’s a certain emotion in her tone (Dr. Quinzel might have been able to define it, but she’s not around anymore) that makes her sound nearly human, “you’re only truly saved—“

“If I leave Arkham. I remember.” Those words haunted Harley’s nightmares for weeks. “But I left. This isn’t Arkham, is it?”

There’s a moment of silence that stretches for longer than it should, somehow. Like Ivy’s having to really think to figure out whether they are in Arkham or they aren’t.

“This isn’t Arkham,” Ivy finally says, “but you haven’t left.”

“What do you mean, I haven’t le—“

“I really don’t have all day, Harley.” That emotion — that near humanity — is completely gone from Ivy’s voice now. “Do you have a place to stay while you recover?”

“Yeah. I can- I can stay at Jay’s.” What does it say about her, that she doesn’t even hesitate to name the man who threw her in a vat of acid as her emergency contact of sorts?

If she was still working, she’d write a thesis on herself.

Pamela Isley doesn’t say anything else, and for a moment Harley wonders if she’s been alone all this time and her admittedly off-kilter brain simply hallucinated a beautiful, jasmine-scented supervillain for her to talk to. It wouldn’t surprise her. Nothing does anymore.

With some effort, Harley sits up and notices where she’s been laying all this time. It’s not a bed — not a normal one, anyway — but it’s soft and comfortable. It’s somehow both cool and cozy, and… alive, somehow. Like moss, but not quite. Which fits, because Pamela Isley happens to be human, almost, but not quite.

Harley doesn’t necessarily mean that in a bad way.

“What did you mean?” Harley says, looking at the blurry outline of Ms. Isley’s — Ivy’s — back. Her eyes are getting used to the light, and she’s pretty sure the current lack of focus is mostly due to her glasses being gone. “When you said I haven’t left?”

“You shouldn’t get up yet. You’ll faint, and pheromones won’t fix a cracked skull.”

“You didn’t answer my question.”

“Do you want to call him to come pick you up?” Ivy pauses for a second, like she’s reconsidering her own words. “Does he even have a phone?”

“I—“

Harley clamps her mouth shut. She doesn’t know if Jay has a phone. She knows the exact location of every scar on his body. She knows exactly what to say and do to make him smile. She knows she can help him — _fix him_ doesn’t sound nearly as good — and she knows she belongs with him. In his world. But she doesn’t know if he has a phone.

The giggles come before she can stop them. It’s not funny, but she’s laughing. She can’t stop. It feels almost like… like in a different life she’d be sobbing instead, but all she can do is laugh.

And it’s cathartic. Like a good, loud, heart-shattering crying session. Like a night of binge-drinking to quiet her thoughts. The laughter grows louder, shriller and more unhinged as she thinks about Dr. Harleen Quinzel no longer existing. Not just because Harley says so, but because she melted along with her glasses when Mr. Jay shoved Harley into that vat. She thinks about a job and a life she’ll never go back to. About the fact that she doesn’t know if Jay has a phone, but she knows the exact sound a skull makes when a mallet cracks it open. 

It’s not funny, but she’s laughing. And when she stops, she feels different somehow. Like she’s laughed whatever was left of Harleen Quinzel away.

“Are you done?”

Pamela Isley isn’t laughing. She’s not even smiling. She’s just staring, in silence, like she either doesn’t know or doesn’t care that being in silence is a recipe for thinking. And thinking… well. There’s nothing fun about that. Can you blame her for trying to entertain herself somehow?

“So. Pam.”

“What did you just call me?”

Pamela Isley is suddenly dangerously close. It may not be jasmine after all. It’s something… earthier. She’s so close Harley doesn’t need her glasses to see the dangerous glint in bright green eyes.

Harley could push it. She tilts her head to one side, smiling faintly as she ponders what would happen if she said it again. Would Pamela Isley kill her, if Harley called her Pam again? And, more importantly, would that be so bad, all things considered?

“Sorry,” she finally says, making sure the mocking tone is audible in her voice, “I figured saving my life twice would’ve kinda put us on a first name basis.”

“Not quite.” 

“Right. Well, Ms. Isley—”

“It’s Ivy!”

Pamela Isley — Poison Ivy — raises her voice. Harley swears the plants around them grow, like they’re getting ready to attack her the second Ivy orders them to.

Except she doesn’t.

Does this count as saving Harley’s life a third time? Choosing not to off her when she could’ve?

“Why do you keep saving me?”

“Excuse me?” Ivy takes one step back, and it’s like the greenery deflates just so. Like it’s all lost steam all of a sudden.

“You heard me,” Harley shrugs, carefully standing up and noticing the oversized t-shirt she’s wearing for the first time, “why do you keep doing it? Not too super-villainy of you, if you ask me.”

The more time she spends with her eyes open, the better she seems to see. Can acid burn somehow fix someone’s vision? She’ll have to tell Mr. Jay about the potential untapped marked in back-alley lasik surgery.

“I wouldn’t call myself a super-villain.”

“Your file at Arkham sure would.”

“Would it? And what does _his_ file say?”

Harley stops staring at an exotic-looking flower to glare at Ivy instead. His file is wrong. His file is the result of a series of biased psychiatrists with questionable methods. They didn’t know him like she does. Nobody does. She’s the only one who understands.

He _needs_ her. She can help.

“And what will _yours_ say, Harley Quinzel?”

“I don’t have a—“

“Oh,” Ivy lets out a chuckle and it kind of feels like Harley figures being hit with her mallet might, “but you will.”

Harley licks her lips. Will she? Will she have a file at Arkham? Have a shrink sit across from her, on the other side of a bulletproof glass, and ask her what went wrong and when? Will she have to talk about Jay’s smile and his scars and the way he pressed her up against the padded wall of the interrogation room? 

Will they call her call her a sociopath, too?

Probably. They’ll be wrong, though. She does feel remorse when she kills. It’s just she’d rather feel that than the absence of him.

“So don’t thank me, Harley. I never saved you.”

~*~

Harley doesn’t remember what she used to look like anymore. Harleen Quinzel may as well have never existed. It’s been three years since she fell into that vat of acid — it sounds better than saying someone threw her in, doesn’t it? — and so much has happened in her life that she can’t remember anything from before she was Harley Quinn anymore. 

She’s been in Arkham… a number of times. Let’s leave it at that. She’s still with Jay. Mostly. On and off. Mostly on, though, other than that nine-month break she took for _personal reasons_ when she went to stay with her sister Delia. 

Mostly, though. Mostly, they’re on. And they’re so good when they are. Mostly. Mostly good.

You wouldn’t get it. Only she gets it. Only she gets _him_.

“Hey, Red?”

Ivy doesn’t even look up from whatever science-y stuff she’s working on, and Harley doesn’t really mind. They’re best pals. They don’t need eye contact to communicate.

“Why d’ya hate him?” Jay finds her new accent cute, like her higher-pitched voice and her red-and-black leotard. 

“Huh?” Harley can feel Ivy’s frown even if she’s currently looking at the back of her head. “Who are we talking about?”

“Mistah Jay.”

She can feel the sour expression on Ivy’s face without seeing it, too.

“I don’t remember having said I hate him.”

“Ya don’t need to. I can just tell, y’know.”

“Can you.” Sometimes Ivy does that thing when she asks a question but her tone isn’t really question-y. Kinda cute, if you ask Harley. Over the years she’s grown to see many of the things about Ivy most people find intimidating are actually pretty dang cute.

“Yeah,” Harley stands up from her favorite moss-covered pouf (Ivy took offense last time Harley called it a beanbag chair) and sits on the edge of Ivy’s desk instead, “kinda like how ya don’t have to say it for me to know ya love me, Red.”

Ivy doesn’t smile, but her skin does. It turns this vibrant green and Harley knows it means Ivy’s smiling on the inside. It’s a whole thing. Just trust her, all right? She knows her Red.

“So. Why d’ya hate him?”

Ivy looks up from whatever botanical gibberish she’s been writing and stares into Harley’s eyes like she’s trying to read her mind.

Good thing her Puddin’s right when he says it’s mostly empty space in there, right?

_Heh_.

“You should’ve paid more attention when you worked at Arkham, Harley.”

Ivy stands up and leaves Harley there, dumbfounded and confused, because what does that even mean? She doesn’t even remember those months. She didn’t even think Ivy remembered. Had they ever even interacted back then? All she remembers are her… sessions, with Jay.

“Hey, wait! Come on, don’t be mean!”

Ivy rolls her eyes at Harley like she’s being overly dramatic (she isn’t), and starts collecting samples from this pots and plants. 

“Why won’t you just tell me? Come on, it’s been forever, I don’t rem—“

The happy sound of a circus fanfare comes from outside Ivy’s lair, and Harley knows exactly what it means. 

“Saved by the… honk, Red.” Harley winks, grabbing her mallet and putting on her hat. She can drop the subject for now. There’ll be more times. “I’ll bring ya somethin’ pretty from the heist, yeah?”

“Be safe.”

Harley’s already skipping towards the exit, but she turns around just to blow Ivy a kiss. “See? I knew ya loved me, Red.”

Ivy doesn’t just smile with her skin this time.

~*~

Harley watches the trial from the couch in the apartment she shares with Ivy and their (Ivy will deny it, but Harley knows she loves them) hyenas. It’s a happy little life. After so many years of super-villainy, switching sides has been kind of weird. 

Well.

They haven’t switched completely. Just ask Batman. But they’re cool with the Batfolk now. Mostly. They promise to keep casualties to a minimum (she vaguely remembers Batman insisting on zero, but that’s a ballpark number, she’s sure) and help them catch the really bad guys, and in exchange they’re mostly free to do as they please. 

It’s kind of weird, watching a trial on TV. A real trial, she means. But she figures when the person being judged is famous enough — and hated enough — it makes sense. And Gotham doesn’t hate anyone as much as they hate Jay.

He doesn’t look scared or nervous at all. Maybe he figures he’ll get out again whenever he pleases. But Bats said that’s not happening this time. Not with all the evidence Harley provided. Having bested it a dozen times herself, Harley can’t say she trusts Arkham’s security system that much. But it doesn’t really matter. She doesn’t really care.

“Ugh, commercial break. Can ya believe it?” Harley scritches Lou’s ear and nudges Bud off the couch so she can stand up. “They can call it a recess all they like, we all know the judge needed to pee.”

She chuckles to herself on the way to the kitchen for a glass of water, and on her way back her gaze lands on the carton box Bats gave her when they made their deal. The one full to the brim with everything that used to be in her and Ivy’s files at Arkham.

And she’s about to flop back onto the couch when a little tape recorder catches her attention instead. Her old tape recorder, from about two lifetimes ago, when she still wore a white coat and was called Dr. Quinzel.

“Let’s see who’s in this tape,” she says out loud as she presses the rewind button, and the two hyenas sit at her feet like they’re waiting for the best kind of treat, “maybe it’ll be Uncle Swamp Thing!”

But when the tape begins to play, the voice that fills the room is Ivy’s instead.

“Oh, jackpot!” Harley grins, muting the television to put her full focus on the preserved moment from over ten years ago. She kinda knows how the trial ends, anyway. Bats spoilered her.

_ “I do appreciate it, you know… the fact that you’re using a recorder instead of paper.” _

Ivy sounds so different. Harley wishes she could remember the conversation, but all she has from those months are snippets of moments with him. 

_ “Others before you had different methods. One of my previous doctors, he brought a potted plant.” _

“Well, that’s nice of him, right boys? Mama loves a plant.”

_ “Watered it with bleach in front of me.” _

Harley gasps, both at the cruelty of what she’s hearing and the fact that she suddenly has the answer to the question she asked so many times over the years. Why did Ivy hate Jay so much?

Harley looks at her bleached skin and can’t help but grin. She’s the one thing Pam loves as much as she loves her plants.

_ “…Doctor, your hormones are elevated. Every time you smile, you blush. Usually, I have to kiss a person to elicit such a response…” _

If she could still blush, she would. She feels her cheeks burn anyway, because back then it wasn’t her girlfriend making her hormones get elevated (or whatever the Ivy from the past just said) but now… well. Now she elevates them plenty.

But more than that, she realizes, suddenly, exactly what Ivy meant when she insisted Harley could not be saved until she left Arkham. How could she really leave when Jay still owned most of her heart?

“They didn’t have double decker poptarts, Peanut. Are you sure they even exist?” Ivy interrupts Harley’s moment of reflection by walking into the apartment carrying several grocery bags and sending the boys into a flurry of excitement. “The lady at the register looked at me like I’d just asked for dragon eggs, so— wait. What are you listening to? Is that me?”

Harley nods, even if she knows Ivy can’t see her while she’s bent over leaving all the grocery bags on the counter.

“What is it? Is that from— oh.”

“Mhmm,” Harley grins, stopping the recording for now. She has the real life version of Ivy right here, so she doesn’t need the past at all. “Ya liked me already back then, huh, Pammy?”

Ivy rolls her eyes, but Harley knows. She knows she did.

“Where’d you get the tape?”

“Bats brought all that over,” Harley points in the general direction of the box, “said we can have it since we’re no longer the baddies.”

Ivy looks in the box and seems genuinely surprised when her gaze returns to Harley once again. “Our files?”

“Mhmm. All of it. Gone.”

It’s only when she tells Ivy that it fully registers for Harley, too. Their files are gone. No more Arkham.

Somewhere in her peripheral vision, she can see the trial’s back on the air. He’s going back in, and she… she wouldn’t say she doesn’t care _at all_. But she’s not going in with him. Her heart’s not his anymore. 

She’s left.

“Pammy?”

Pam doesn’t look up from her hands as they rummage through the contents of the box, but she doesn’t need to. Harley knows she’s listening.

“Thank you.”

“Why?” Ivy looks at Harley then, frowning slightly in confusion. “I wasn’t the one who negotiated with Wayne.”

“No, I know.” Harley smiles and walks over, just to be closer. To smell the jasmine on her girlfriend’s skin. “But you saved me. A couple times. So thank you.”

And for the very first time, Harley’s pretty sure she’s figured something out before her (very smart, super quick-on-her-feet) girlfriend. Because Ivy looks at the box again, and at the muted TV where the trial is still happening, and then at Harley… and she smiles.

“You’re welcome, Harls.”


End file.
